The invention relates to drawer guide with a self-closing mechanism, with a guide rail to be attached to a body wall of an item of furniture, and a running rail that is movably supported relative to the guide rail and attached to the drawer, optionally with an interposed center rail. A movable ratchet element is disposed in a ratchet housing arranged on one of the two aforementioned outer rails and pretensioned in two end positions that are spaced apart in the movement direction of the drawers. The ratchet element has a receptacle for a catch, which enters the receptacle when the rails move relative to each other to approach the closed position, thereby disengaging the pretensioned movable ratchet element from the corresponding end position and moving the ratchet element by spring tension into the other end position. The ratchet element entrains the corresponding rail in the closing direction of the drawer by the catch held in the receptacle.
Self-closing drawer guides of this type (DE 4 020 277 C2) have been more frequently employed over the past years. Such drawer guides forcibly secure a pull-out drawer held in a cabinet body through the tension force of a pretensioned spring in the closing position, while the drawer is still being closed, but before reaching the fully closed position, and prevent accidental opening, which could occur, for example, when the drawer stop contacts the cabinet body or when air is displaced in the cabinet body, for example, when adjacent drawers are opened and closed. Because modern drawer guides tend to slide easily due to support of the rails by roller bodies or rollers, the pretensioning springs used for closing the drawer have to be sized so that the corresponding drawers can safely close even when they are heavily loaded and, on the other hand, more lightly loaded drawers are not accidentally opened by air currents in the cabinet body. It has been observed that a spring with a pretension that optimally satisfies all these requirements is difficult to design. Typically, the tension force of the spring is therefore designed with a safety margin, which causes at least lighter drawers to close more quickly and hit the cabinet body, if a person operating the drawer does not intentionally slow down the closing motion. Many buyers of furniture object to this erratic closure, prompting the furniture manufacturers during the past years to make changes by including additional damping devices that are effective between the drawer and the cabinet body during the automatic drawer closure. These damping devices can prevent an excessive acceleration of the drawer when the spring tension of the self-closing mechanism is too high. However, the use of these additional damping devices represents an additional expense in the construction and assembly of the drawers. In addition, the damping devices are at least partially visible when the drawers are open, which is visually objectionable and poses the additional risk that objects placed in the drawers can get caught in these devices.